[Verizon Droid Incredible 2] Astromech:
Lots of weirdness after Virtuous Unity and Titanium restore

I rooted and ROM'd for the first time last night. I chose Virtuous Unity from ROM Manager and loaded that (v1.31.3 (VivoW). I had it do all the backup and wipe/cache actions first.

At first things seemed to be going fine. All my stuff was downloading and updating. Then it hit a snag - no more storage space. So I deleted the backup I did as part of the flash process because I had originally just done a backup without any kind of flash right before that because I didn't know it was going to ask me that again. Then I figured i'd restore everything as it was originally using a Titanium backup restore (Restore all apps with data) since things had originally fit just fine, pre-flash. Then for good measure I moved 80 something apps to the SD card with ZD box's app2sd tool just to relieve some pressure.

At some point in here I did the fix permissions thing too just because I had read other people did it and it helped.

When I went to sleep, things seemed to be OK, looking like the new ROM. When I woke up, things looked like the old ROM and were messed up. I was back to what looked like my pre-ROM-flashing settings, rainbow bubble wallpaper and everything. I guess that makes sense because I reloaded apps and data and everything from after I rooted but before I flashed a ROM. But I'm not sure why I wouldn't have seen all this last night. The problem was all of my widgets had turned into truncated error messages. The clock/weather widget was just gone. The search widget was just gone. The messages widget was just gone. All the other widgets were still represented on screen, but just as empty boxes with error messages in them. I could delete and re-add some widgets, but could not re-add the flipclock/weather or search. There are no HTC widgets available in the HTC widget area, where there were formerly 40-50 of them.

So I restarted the phone, hoping that would fix it. It made it worse. Now a lot of random app icons have turned into generic Android icons. They still work, which is great, but something has gone wrong there.

Also, the Market force closes over and over even without me having touched it. When I do try to launch it from its icon, it won't. Just more force closes.

Oops, and now I just changed the wallpaper and stuff around and now some icons are back (instead of being generic Android icons) and some aren't. I try to click generic icon for Gallery and nothing happens. Same with Kindle. Market at least has the decency to still give me a force close message.

Also I can't remember what specifically, but something in this process offered/prompted me to join HTCsense.com, so I did. But it sends me a verification email and I click the link to verify and it says it can't proceed because I need to click it from the email account to which it was sent. Buuut that's what I did.

Also Sense crashes now and then.

Also I now get those stupid texts from Verizon (VZWNMN) that I read about other people getting but had never gotten myself - the ones that coincide with you getting an email. Some new email synchronization service of theirs. I've followed the directions to turn it off on the Verizon site but it hasn't stopped yet. Maybe it takes a day to kick in.

What the hell is going on?! Have I done something wrong? Everybody speaks so highly of this ROM. I see discussion topics about 2.x versions but I just took whatever ROM manager gave me, plus a patch that went along with it, and it installed that. To get 2.x, would I just download it via computer and manually put it on the SD card? Is that the problem here? An old buggy version?

What's the best course for me to take? Different version? Different ROM? I wanted Cyanogen but they only offer nightlies right now, no stable version. Suggestions?